Consumer SSDs benchmarked to death—and last far longer than rated

We last checked in with TechReport’s grand SSD torture test back in June 2014, when the first drives in the six-drive roundup had failed. The drives to first fall victim to the unending barrage of data writes were the Intel 335, one of two Kingston HyperX 3Ks (the one tasked with an non-compressible workload to stymie its compression-happy Sandforce controller), and the Samsung 840. All three failed short of 1PB of writes, but it’s also important to note that all of them—even the TLC-equipped Samsung 840—far exceeded their manufacturers’ stated write lifetimes.

Tech-savvy buyers who might be worried about SSD lifetime decreasing even as SSD capacity skyrockets should have their fears assuaged by the ridiculous number of writes the tested drives endured; the drive that survived the longest survived more than 2.4 petabytes worth of sustained writes. That’s probably about 240x as much writing as a typical consumer SSD would need to endure over its lifetime.

And—spoiler alert!—what was the final drive, the one that kept slogging through its workload after all its fellows had fallen? The last drive standing was a Samsung 840 Pro. This MLC drive is targeted by Samsung at enthusiasts and even at light enterprise usage and comes with a five-year warranty; it’s not surprising that it lasted to the very end. What is surprising is the sheer amount of writes that it swallowed before eventually giving up—the little drive definitely went above and beyond the call of duty.

To read about the entire experiment from its beginnings, start with the introduction piece from August 2013 and click on through to the end. It's an epic tale of reads and writes—a saga of saves and errors, of crashes and brickings and triumph in the face of an almost uncountable stream of IOPS.

Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Lee_Ars